When NPR asked Rep. Pete Olson of Texas how his celebration of America being pulled out of the Paris climate accord with the record breaking rainfall that just submerged Houston, Olson predictably said that it was the wrong time to have a discussion about climate change. Olson also played what he must have believed was his trump card. In 1900, he said, Galveston was wiped out by a hurricane that killed 8,000 people.

Olson's argument is weak, but it's not hard to follow: If Harvey, which happened in 2017, killed 70 people, and the Great Storm of 1900 killed 8,000, then the 1900 storm must have been significantly worse. And if the Great Storm of 1900 was worse than Harvey, then there's no reason to wonder if climate change contributed to Harvey's downpour.

But as MIT's Kerry Emmanuel later explained to NPR, the death toll was as high as it was in Galveston in 1900 primarily because "there was no warning of it. We didn't have good forecasts in that day. That's why it killed so many people."

Emmanuel said that Harvey's surge was higher "simply because it was riding on top of an elevated sea level. The other thing is that the atmosphere is about 6 percent more humid than it would have been at that time of year at that place [in], say, 1980, because it's warmer. And those are the two things that we can be fairly certain about." But he cautioned against certitude - from those who believe that climate change is happening and from those who don't.

"I think it's very natural whenever you have an extreme event, people wanna know what caused it. Back in the '80s, any of these events would have been blamed on El Nino. So one has to be careful. You can't jump to the conclusion it's because of climate change. But on the other hand, you can't embrace the opposite fallacy that there's nothing to see here."

But as Olson's allusion to 1900 Galveston illustrates, "there's nothing to see here" has become a mantra of Republicans in power. Why is that? It's not like Republicans are less vulnerable to a changing climate. It's not like rising sea levels and more powerful storms will single out Democrats. So how come so many are so adamant that nothing's happening?

In a Monday piece for The Intercept, writer Naomi Klein argues that Republicans deny climate change because to admit its existence would mean they'd have to change their entire political ideology. Klein notes that when Hurricane Irma reached Category 5 strength in the Atlantic - the first storm ever known to reach that strength that far out -- President Donald Trump considered it the perfect time to gather his cabinet to hammer out a plan to cut taxes.

It's important to link the Category 5 storm and the Republicans' push for lower taxes, Klein writes, because denying climate change helps Republicans argue against the need for more taxes.

As Klein puts it, "if climate change is driving the kinds of catastrophes we are seeing right now -- and it is -- then it doesn't just mean Trump has to apologize and admit he was wrong when he called it a Chinese hoax. It means that he also needs to junk his whole tax plan, because we're going to need that tax money (and more) to pay for a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. And it also means he's going to have to junk his deregulatory plan, because if we are going to change how we power our lives, we're going to need all kinds of regulations to manage and enforce it." Trump and the climate-denying Republican governors around the country "would have to junk an entire twisted worldview holding that the market is always right, regulation is always wrong, private is good and public is bad, and taxes that support public services are the worst of all."

Accepting the reality of climate change "detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests. To admit that the climate crisis is real is to admit the end of their political and economic project."

The novelist Upton Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to
understand
something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

The same idea seems to apply here. Surely Republicans in Louisiana and Texas and Florida can see the effects of a changing climate. But admitting its reality would mean that so many of the things that they've championed are contributing to the damage.